VANCOUVER — Connor McDavid coming off a sub-par game, and Leon Draisaitl playing hurt.
You might be able to overcome one of those. But both?
The poor Vancouver Canucks, they never had a chance.
“McDavid and Draisaitl, they were unreal,” Canucks coach Rick Tocchet marveled after the game. “They were all over the ice tonight.”
In a Game 2 described by Mattias Ekholm as “not a must-win, but close to it,” the Edmonton Oilers pulled away from Vancouver as the game went on Friday, overcoming a one-goal deficit three separate times in a 4-3 overtime win that evens the series at 1-1.
Evan Bouchard’s long wrist shot rattled in off of Canucks defenceman Ian Cole for the OT winner, but it was identical one-goal, four-point nights by the Oilers’ two superstars that stoked the playoff legend of Draisaitl and McDavid.
“They’re hungry. They know what’s at stake, and the best players bring out the best of themselves in these kinds of situations,” Ekholm said. “They’re the top two players in the world, in my mind. When they put on a show like they did tonight, when they bring their ‘A’ game, it’s hard to stop.”
The matching four-point nights hoisted the duo past Mario Lemieux and into second and third place all-time in points per playoff game. Wayne Gretzky averaged 1.84 points per night, while Draisaitl (1.66) and McDavid (1.64) are officially in hot pursuit.
McDavid was coming off a Game 1 in which he had zero shots on goal for the first time in his playoff career, and only one assist. He was predictably lethal in his bounce-back game, tying the game on a third-period breakaway and taking a house full of hockey nervous fans out of their seats, shift after shift.
Then there’s Draisaitl, who injured his back (suspected) in Game 1.
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“We didn’t even know he was going to play until after the warm-up. I really didn’t know,” said head coach Kris Knoblauch.
“I saw him in the warm-up, I felt confident that he was going to be able to play. I didn’t know how well he was going to play. I didn’t expect him to come out perform like that.
“He plays his best when it’s the most difficult.”
Folks assume that McDavid is the Oilers’ big advantage, and of course, it’s hard to argue that point.
But in Draisaitl, the Oilers have a second-line centre who is better than about 28 other teams’ first-line centres. Maybe more.
He’s their best faceoff man and power-play finisher, with due respect to Zach Hyman. So Knoblauch, you can imagine was fretting his absence ever since the conclusion of Game 1, two nights previous.
“He had a couple of shifts, and then we had that first penalty kill,” Knoblauch recounted. “The faceoff was on (his strong) side, and he’s looking over, like, ‘Do you want me to take it?’
“As soon as he gave me that look, I knew: ‘OK, we’re going to be fine. He’s going to have a heck of a game.”
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Oh boy, did he ever.
“If you want to win, your best players have to be your best players,” Hyman said. “I think every coach will tell you that.”
McDavid coming off a bad game. Draisaitl with one foot on injured reserve.
It’s the difference between meeting that black bear on the trail during the salmon run, or one stumbling grumpily out of hibernation.
It’s the difference between that ’82 Camaro that uncle Barry pulled out of the Auto Trader, and after he dropped that 350 under the hood.
“That’s what makes him probably the best player to ever play,” Draisaitl said of McDavid. “It’s his will to push himself to more. To be better. There’s no one out there like him.”
“He’s a great player. An amazing player,” McDavid said of Draisaitl. “One of the best players in the world, and the best player in the world on a lot of nights. Tonight was one of those nights.”
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These teams had played five periods of hockey with little to choose between them, when Nikita Zadorov broke open a 2-2 tie late in the second period, with a bad-angle shot that Stuart Skinner has to have.
It could have been crippling for Edmonton. Instead, that deficit provided the requisite desperation to forge the most dominant period this series has seen, as Edmonton outshot the Canucks 15-2 in the third.
They took this game away, and the Hockey Gods paid out in the form of the lucky carom that ended overtime in Edmonton’s favour.
“We have a pretty experienced team,” said winger Warren Foegele. “We’ve got a lot of guys that have played in the playoffs and big moments. I think this group just has lots of belief.”
“This was a game where we took halfway through, and we just kept calm and kept pushing,” said Ekholm, who scored his second goal of the series and watched his partner Bouchard end the game with a lucky one. “It’s a bounce, but I thought we earned it tonight.”
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Bouchard played one second shy of a 30-minute game Friday, while Ekholm logged nearly 26 minutes. That pair spent the evening with McDavid (28:12), Draisaitl (27:05) and Hyman (25:45), a group of five that was simply too much for the Canucks to handle for as many minutes as Knoblauch ran them.
“I thought we were building all night,” Hyman said. “It was low event shot-wise the two periods, but I thought we were building our game, building our game… We’re down 3-2, but I thought we were the better team through two.
“You need to make a push,” he said. “We made a push, and who else to score the tying goal but Connor. Doing his thing.”
Doing their thing.
The Oilers will need some help from the rest of the group, to be sure.
But for one night, we saw the legend of the two-headed monster. It was simply too much — there’s no other way to say it.
